This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Dear educators: this year put the kids first

After the labour strife, cancelled extracurriculars and disappointed students, Columnist Royson James has lessons for those at the head of the class

Teachers protest during one-day strike action last school year. This school year, educators have an opportunity to do better by students, suggests columnist Royson James (RICK MADONIK / TORONTO STAR file photo)

As Labour Day gives way to the sweetest of September rituals — crayons and lunch box surprises, recess relief from maddening math, cross-country runs and science club fun — here’s a challenge for Ontario educators:

In concept and design, philosophy and practice, this is a place of awe and creative genius and just hanging with friends and bumping up against something new and different day after day.

Reclaim it this school year, please, administrators, ministry of education officials, principals, teachers.

Article Continued Below

Enough of labour conflicts that pin student wrestling clubs to the mat; suspend the debilitating debates about the efficacy of one-line comments on report cards; find the money to infuse the curriculum with music and arts and sports which engage the spirit and feed the soul; value teachers, embrace parents. Above all, think about the children.

Need we remind you of last school year — a calamitous calendar that sent thousands off to university with a bitter taste of an Ontario high school education gone sour.

“It was our last year, and, it was like, a bummer,” says Shanice Strachan, who attended Pickering High and saw activities drastically curtailed in her school club of choice, Love 146, devoted to the ending of sex slavery.

“We had to meet without teachers and all that foolishness, because of that strike. Then there was the possibility we would not have a prom; it was so annoying.”

It’s not that the students don’t care; or that they are clueless. No, the political machinations between Queen’s Park and the teachers unions are not their priority, and should not be. The students are about soaking up every possible experience at the most awkwardly amazing time in their lives.

And last year we adults set about screwing it up for our public school students.

New year. New challenges. New opportunities. New resolutions and a chance at redemption in our schools.

Across Ontario this week, nearly 2 million high school and elementary school students will walk into one of nearly 5,000 public or Catholic schools paid for by tax dollars. One-third of them are right here in Greater Toronto.

Use standardized tests without becoming slaves to their dictates. Teach the whole child, with reference to status, cultural experience and an eye to the broad and dynamic world.

As we enter this new era of “safe schools,” buttressed by locked front doors after the morning bell, and the presence of police officers in the halls, seek new ways to insulate the children from the cruelties of a society struggling to check its deviants. This is a work in progress, a real time laboratory.

Ontario teachers will soon need two years of training before getting their credentials. That’s good. If only we could transform their image in two years. Teachers are our most important resource — a precious, valued asset. Most parents recognize this. Too often, teachers’ unions, provincial masters and rogue teachers do much to sully their reputation. No profession more deserves our respect and our investment.

The Toronto District School Board’s push under ex-director Chris Spence to open up boutique-style specialty schools is enlightened and inspired. It should continue. Schools with a focus on music, sports, arts — even all-boys and all-girls — provide a menu of choices for students with alternate points of engagement.

Enrolment at TDSB schools just recently began to climb again after years of decline. “Our biggest challenge is not underachievement; it’s disengagement,” Spence once said.

Parents are baffled at grading guidelines that seem to handicap teachers from penalizing students who fail to complete assignments on time. Punctuality and responsibility are important lessons. Failure to complete tasks violates those requirements essential to life success.

But any parent of an unmotivated learner or late bloomer understands the need to nurture and apply alternate methods to promote student growth. Educators must improve how they communicate the seemingly conflicting ideals at play here.

The TDSB has much to do to restore the good-faith contract with citizens. Huge cost-overruns on school construction projects are worthy of scorn; outrageous spending for minor repairs is intolerable and unconscionable — especially in a cash-strapped board struggling to balance its budget.

The budget squeeze is the greatest threat to our children, especially those from at-risk neighbourhoods. In its annual survey of Ontario’s publicly funded schools, People for Education shows that students from at-risk neighbourhoods are less likely to get music education, arts, enroll in gifted programs or the growing number of activities that now have fees attached to them.

Schools from middle-class neighbourhoods have grown adept at fundraising, masking the impact of budget cuts. Low-income neighbourhoods can’t match such spending-power so their kids do without.

Cutbacks reduce supplies of pencils, frequency of class trips, access to music teachers and librarians and community access to school facilities. Cuts also dilute and denude the basic human contacts of student and educator, as described by this school secretary:

“The subtle interaction you had with the kids is substituted with hurried responses as you have only three hours to complete your work, and you didn’t take lunch, so you don’t have time to ask them what is wrong and try to help them in some small way.”

Six weeks after I arrived in Canada, I enrolled at Harbord Collegiate, the day after Labour Day.

Hamlet would succeed Julius Caesar in English class, but it was still Shakespeare. Like poles still repelled and unlike poles still attracted in science class; the alimentary canal was still elementary; and Christopher Columbus still held claim to “discovering” the Americas.

The life-altering changes — the ones that influenced and impacted and linked students to community and the world around them — would evolve elsewhere at HCI.

By November, football had replaced cricket in my affections; basketball was about to usurp soccer. Sports became the conduit to settlement and integration.

It was easy to be swept along with the marching band and cheerleaders and school spirit assemblies that whipped us up with righteous fervour as we strutted and hollered down Bloor St. to Varsity Stadium for the junior football championships against Lawrence Park Collegiate.

It’s not that school spirit was a foreign concept. The previous school year I was a Cornwallian — proud student at Cornwall College in Montego Bay, the stalwart all-boys high school whose “old boys” still send me weekly and daily dispatches on the exploits of the red and gold.

But here I was learning a familiar new refrain:

It’s no slight to my teachers of Latin and English and Calculus that the Harbord teacher who had the greatest impact on my life was coach and PE instructor Dave Grace. His gospel of teamwork and determination and discipline and fighting against the odds, even when overmatched, was just what this teenager needed.

Non-sport moments also linger: school rep at the Empire Club luncheon at the Royal York; among a group from Toronto students who travelled to Chicoutimi and Arvida, Quebec as part of a student exchange Young Voyageur program.

I got used to being the only black kid in the room; other people did, too, in our great Toronto.

The Septembers roll on. On Tuesday, millions of kids — first-time kindergarten tykes all the way up to career students rooted in musty lecture halls — venture out in search of the spark that ignites a thirst for knowledge and fills the hunger to discover.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com